Barcelona
April 23rd, 2007 -- Posted in Spain | 2 Comments »For starters, I just want to clarify that we are not spending all of our time on the internet!! We are in Montpellier, France at the moment and are waiting for a train to Nice. We have about four hours here, however the train station has no place for our big backpacks. We’ve decided to use the time for planning our quint stint in Italy, on the way to catch a ferry to Turkey on Sunday. We’ll be in Nice only for the night, passing through to Genoa en route to Cinque Terre — one of my dream locations for some time now.
Ok, now on to our time in Barcelona.
I LOVE Barcelona. What an amazing city. Barcelona was much easier communication wise than Granada (***side story below, doesn’t really fit here, but it does illustrate the communication issues we had in Spain, specifically Granada and Madrid), and has an excellent transit system. We had some challenges arriving on Friday night without a reservation and wandered up and down the streets surrounding La Rambla for 1.5 hours before we lucked out and found a room for the night (though they were not also available on Saturday night). La Rambla is one of the main avenues in Barcelona and is quite touristy, however at night it is filled with locals out for a stroll as well. On La Rambla at one of the many patios, we had the largest cervecas ever (in Canada we call them pitchers).
I am a huge Antoni Gaudi fan, and it was a huge thrill to actually go into his buildings. When Morag and I travelled to Barcelona after University, we were too broke to actually go into many attractions, so it was nice to finally see some of the places that I’ve admired for so long. Considering when these buildings were built (or started) - the late 1800s and early 1900s, I think it is amazing that his work was taken seriously. So much of it is purely for asthetic and fun. Casa Batllo was among the highlights of the entire trip so far for me. I have a lot of really good pictures that we’ll upload hopefully soon.
Just realized that we have to get a move on for the train. Sorry to stop mid way, but that’s all for now!!
P
***We stopped into a sandwich (bocadillo) shop in Granada for a late breakfast. On the menu, I recognized “omelette” to be something related to eggs, likely on bread due to the fact that we were in a sandwich shop. I asked for an “om-lette” probably too close to the french pronunciation… blank stare… I pointed at the menu, saying “omlette” (likely louder and slower, of course not helping matters)… this time I got a “whats your problem” look… finally the server half slid over the counter, saw what I was pointing at, and said “ah, om-el-ette”. We had lots of encounters like this prior to Barcelona.
